Southside 1-1000

“Tomorrow all you’ll read is a short item in your paper,” says the narrator’s voice at the end of Boris Ingster’s Southside 1-1000, implying how little the average American knows about the rampant counterfeiting U.S. Treasury agents are combating in any given week. Opening with newsreel footage and a documentary introduction to the economic impact of currency circulation (“A counterfeiter is more than a criminal, he’s a saboteur”), Ingster’s film is didactic and formal, nearly the opposite of his only other noir, the dreamy, expressionistic Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), but still offers an entertaining yarn about a federal agent who goes undercover inside a gang of violent, ruthless dealers of “queer” bills. The acting talent is mediocre, but Don DeFore does fine as John Riggs, the T-man who pretends to be a thief interested in dealing phony bills to get in with Bill Evans (Barry Kelley), Reggie (George Tobias), and inmate engraver Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum), who unleashes this latest wave of fake bills by smuggling his plates out of prison. In Los Angeles, Riggs gets the hots for the manager of the hotel where he’s staying, Nora Craig (Andrea King), whose connection to the counterfeiters becomes clearer over time. The film is at its best when delivering its copious noir visuals, cinematographer Russell Harlan amping up the low-key, chiaroscuro lighting every chance he gets, deep focus and oblique angles intensifying the noir atmosphere, especially in the protracted, no-holds-barred gunfight throughout an abandoned warehouse comprising the final sequence.